


Custodial

by neifile7



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 01, Stopwatch kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-09
Updated: 2013-10-09
Packaged: 2017-12-28 21:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/997096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neifile7/pseuds/neifile7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Ianto Jones tried to clean up the mess, and one time he didn't have to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Custodial

**Author's Note:**

> Ianto Jones should, by rights, have his own menu in the Statistical and Diagnostic Manual: OCD and PTSD for starters, with big side orders of co-dependency and passive aggression. And now I've saddled him with adolescent trauma and extra fetishes for afters. A few variations on familiar themes.
> 
> Originally published on LJ on 1/24/09.

1.

He primps the freesias in the vase and inhales their fragrance, a welcome breather from ammonia and urine and overripe body.  He’s done his best with the sponge baths but it’s not enough.  At least the bed has fresh pillows and sheets with neat hospital corners, and the swirly afghan that his auntie knitted, all red and orange beneath the lax gray hands.

 

Surely they won’t take her away to hospice as long as he keeps it like this, warm and bright and orderly.  He picks up the clipboard and carefully records her pulse and meds, pressing the biro hard to disguise the still-childish loops of his cursive.

 

There’s no sound in the room except for the soft drip of the IV and the ventilator wheeze. No sound, until he hears the muffled crash from the kitchen that signals an overturned chair, or maybe a smashed bottle this time.  He finishes his jottings and waits for the coda of distant retching, then walks out, collecting the bucket and mop along the way.

 

2.

He’s done what he can with the Tourist Centre: scrubbed the brickwork, replaced the postcards, negotiated a truce between Jack’s orders (seedy window-dressing, for god’s sake don’t make it inviting) and his own intolerance for mildew and bad lighting.  It’s dingy, but he prefers that to echoes of London’s spit and polish, and he can update his lists and pursue his furtive research in relative peace.  It gets him away from the kindergarten chaos of the Hub, and (more shamefully) from the dank sub-basement where he’s stashed what’s left of his heart.

 

It takes all of seventeen seconds to smash his quiet into a hostage standoff. Jack, eyes locked on Carys, brushes off his assistance ( _just open the door!_ ); she clutches that creepy stasis jar like it’s her last defense, before flinging it abruptly at the bead curtain.   And Jack simply _lets her go_ – mad sex alien on the loose, and he can’t hurdle the counter fast enough in the other direction.  He ignores Tosh and Gwen as they pause and then pelt outside, ignores Ianto’s hovering, just crouches in the broken glass and extends shaky fingers.

 

There are splinters and splashes of pungent chemical everywhere.  Later, there will be a dozen deaths to restage and several memories to rewrite.  But all of Ianto’s rags and retcon and record-keeping can’t wipe up the image of Jack, hunched and oblivious, cradling the severed hand like that of an ailing lover.

 

3.

It’s not the first corpse he’s handled for Torchwood, but it’s the first one he’s responsible for.  The first one he has to haul through strobe-lit corridors without benefit of body-bag or gurney, blood already tacky on his best suit. Those imminent stains will be a poor penance; it seems petty, how he’d resented the doctor’s clinical fondling, not even an hour (a lifetime) ago.  It shames him, now, to deposit this man like so much refuse under a filthy tarp, shames him far more than Jack’s twang in his ear, worry sharpening under the distant banter.

 

He dreads the mess that awaits him back in that room.  The chair, the lamp, the books he’d installed, every futile fragment of domesticity, all singed and soiled by rage and grief sparking like live current.  Nothing to do but bolt the door, try to contain the bloodstains, contain the menace and the _voice_ that have taken hold of his Lisa, contain the power that’s draining fast out of the Hub and out of his life.

 

But when he returns, Jack has drawn a bead on Lisa, Gwen’s strapped and shrieking, and there’s no containment possible this side of judgment day.

 

4.

He stands back with a hand on her shoulder and hopes she can’t feel how he’s trembling with seasick relief.  Jack’s easy brutality has rescued them again, but for once without leaving (visible) bodies in the wrack.  Just the saltwater streaks on Toshiko’s face, and perhaps a few jagged spars of the Good Ship Team Torchwood, bobbing flotsam on the shockwaves.

 

Well.  A boatload of paperwork, too.  He steers Tosh into the conference room, fetches the requisite forms, a box of tissues, and a glass of water (she refuses coffee; wise choice, as she won’t sleep tonight without retcon or Owen’s Weevil-strength sedatives).  He gentles her through the necessary questions while she turns the pendant over and over in her hand.

 

“I’m sorry,” she blurts at length, and it’s a non-sequitur, because he’s just asked about Mary’s internet trawling.  “I’m sorry I listened,” and he flushes because he doesn’t know what she heard but it can’t be good.  “And I’m sorry that I didn’t understand before.  Christ, Ianto, please -- just don’t tell me, welcome to the club,” and he doesn’t, merely pries her hand open and folds it around another tissue.

 

 

5.

He strips off Suzie’s clothes and bags them, trying not to think about the obscene tattoo of red holes in the white raincoat.  Jack must have emptied a full clip into her.  Well, Suzie got off a few rounds herself, didn’t she?  And judging by Jack’s looks, now that relief and adrenaline have ebbed, she’s hit a vital organ or two.

 

He’s eased the body bag into its drawer but left the zip open.  Jack will want to see her one last time before she’s filed away, because that’s what Jack does.  Whatever mistakes he makes (and Ianto has stopped keeping score because it’s petty and useless), he faces them full on, afterwards.

 

Ianto picks up the clipboard.  Back in the days when Jack turned everything into innuendo, he’d tease Ianto about his fixation with paperwork and brooms and bin-liners. Sex games in the making, that’s what Jack saw, not the implements that kept the Hub and their collective noses clean and gave Ianto’s life its fragile cohesion. 

 

So he’s not quite sure why he wants to spare Jack now, even if the old satisfaction wells up as he goes down the list.  Name, date of birth, position held, length of employment, date of death.  Tick tick tick in a steady rhythm until he reaches “Cause of death,” and hesitates, just as Jack slumps against the drawers opposite him, head bowed.  

 

Ianto pauses to inventory the pinched mouth and hands dug deep into pockets. Nothing he can fix, nothing that he can afford to care about, even, but some bone-deep instinct prompts a review of the other tools at hand.  What occurs to him seems paltry, but it’s novel, at least, and maybe enough to scrub the shadows from Jack’s face for a while.

 

6.

His first coherent thought, afterwards, is that they’ve made an ungodly mess and for once in his life he does not fucking care.  Still face down, he can see teethmarks in the pillowcase that he’d clutched to ripping point.  He shifts languidly to one side and can feel the slick trails of come and lube all over the twisted sheets, his chest, thighs, and – hair?  Smells like it.  They’ve destroyed the bed.  That’s a cliché.  So are the strewn bits of clothing, possibly stained beyond the powers of dry-cleaning, wadded and missing vital buttons, no doubt.

 

It takes a moment to register Jack’s absence, another to hear him running water in the tiny bathroom, but before resentment can stir, the bed dips.  Jack’s huge hands run a washcloth over his chest and abdomen, and it’s warm and pleasantly rough and mildly scented with sandalwood.  Those hands ease him onto his stomach and gently wipe at his crease and thighs, and he shivers with a powerful aftershock.  He senses rather than sees Jack spreading a larger towel over the damp sheets, spooning up to Ianto as he untwists the covers, one-armed, and wraps them snugly around their bodies.

 

Maybe later, Jack will let him shower, and change the sheets (hospital corners, of course), and salvage their clothing, and figure out where the damn stopwatch wound up.   But for now, he’s content with this: Jack’s face pressing into his shoulder-blades, the sweet-sweat tang on their skins.  So many ways they can mess each other up, clean each other up, while the night lasts.  There’s quite a list.

 

 


End file.
